‘Like a testament.’ Historic church destroyed by WKY tornado restored, reopened | Opinion
The violent nighttime tornado that spun a swath of death and destruction through western Kentucky four years ago devastated much of Mayfield and reduced some of the city’s oldest churches to rubble.
“Others chose to rebuild, we chose to repair,” said Thomas Bright, 70, a steward and trustee at St. James African Methodist Episcopal, the oldest historically Black church in the Graves County seat. “There was so much history in this building that would have been lost had we built a new church.”
That history includes a rare mural painted by Helen LaFrance, a nationally-acclaimed Graves County artist sometimes called “the Black Grandma Moses.” While the powerful EF-4 twister dubbed ‘The Beast” toppled part of the steeple of the 1923 vintage red brick house of worship, collapsed the roof into the sanctuary and shattered its precious stained-glass windows, the wall painting survived.
“To see that it was still there was like a testament,” said the Rev. Gloria Lasco, the church’s pastor. She said the painting provides “history, culture, art and spirituality all in one place.”
The church at 419 S. 8th St. reopened for worship late last year, following a three-year, $1.8 million project funded from federal, state and private sources. It was dedicated in a special service in which several speakers referred to the church as “the miracle on Eighth Street.”
Following the service, people stayed for photographs and selfies in front of the mural, which was restored by historic preservationists Anthony and Mata Kartsonas, founders of Historic Surfaces.
LaFrance, who died in Mayfield in 2020 at age 101, sometimes painted religious-themed murals inside churches. The one in St. James AME depicts Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane before His arrest while His disciples sleep. A LaFrance mural of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus in the River Jordan was lost when the tornado destroyed Fairview Baptist, another historic Black church in Mayfield.
Bright and other church members feared that with the roof gone, rain and snow might blow in and damage the mural beyond repair. As a stopgap, they covered the artwork with a tarp.
Saving the mural, which is painted on a concrete wall behind the choir loft, became a top priority when church officials decided to rebuild.
Church leaders sought suggestions from preservationists and art conservators nationwide on how to save the mural. One proposal called for sawing it into blocks and reassembling it when the church reconstruction was finished. Copying it from a color photograph and repainting elsewhere in the restored church was another idea.
“But when the Kartsonas couple came, they said it could be restored on the spot,” Bright said, adding that Ray Black and Sons, the Paducah contractors that rebuilt the church, shielded the mural with plywood and installed climate control equipment.
Bright, who grew up in the church, said nobody seems to know when LaFrance painted the mural. It is signed, not dated.
“In glowing colors and sharp brush strokes, Ms. LaFrance painted church picnics and river baptisms; tobacco barns; backyard gardens with geese and children racing through them; kitchens with bushels of apples and jars of preserves shining like stained-glass windows,” says her New York Times obituary. “Her exuberant scenes of rural life invited comparisons to the work of Grandma Moses, Horace Pippin and other regional painters who drew from their memories to tell stories about a vanished time and place.”
The obituary also says that LaFrance earned a Kentucky Folk Art Heritage Award in 2011 and that “Oprah Winfrey, Bryant Gumbel and the collector Beth Rudin DeWoody have all bought her work, which is in the permanent collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art in Owensboro, Ky.”
She is the subject of books, including “She Remembered It All: The Art of Memory Painter Helen LaFrance” written by Trigg countian Jayne Moore Waldrop, and illustrated by Nashville artist Michael McBride, a professor at Tennessee State University.
Waldrop was at the service.
LaFrance, who is in the Kentucky Human Rights Commission Hall of Fame, grew up in a farm family in Jim Crow-era Graves County when segregation and race discrimination were the law and the social order. She taught herself to paint and was also a quilter, wood carver and dollmaker. Bright remembered when LaFrance lived in the country, she had converted an old school bus into her art studio.
While the church was built in 1923, the cornerstone says the congregation was founded in 1868, three years after slavery and the Civil War ended. But Dr. David Pizzo, a Murray State University historian, said his student Cari Mikez of Mayfield discovered a copy of the Sept. 15, 1911, Mayfield Messenger that included a story about a four-day “observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the St. James A.M.E church.” The Civil War started in April 1861.
The Rev. Lasco came to St. James shortly before the tornado hit. “I am a person that loves art,” she said, “and to know that Helen LaFrance had painted that mural and knowing the importance of her in Black art history just took my breath away.”
Berry Craig of Arlington, Ky. is a professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the author of “Kentuckians and Pearl Harbor: Stories from the Day of Infamy.”